Depends on which module you used. Parts of it worked great, other parts sucked donkey ass.
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EPIC is good, but I'm hoping to work with VistA when I graduate.
T
TotalFusionOne
Oh man the three of us should get together and work on VistA together!
EPIC is good, but I'm hoping to work with VistA when I graduate.[/QUOTE]
I'm hoping that when I get my networking degree, I can use my contacts from my work with them to get a job for Epic directly and get my Epic certification. If I get that, I can write my own ticket. Salaries for jobs with Epic Certification start at around 80k/year.
They won't be able to afford them until the patent(s) run out. Then they will get something that otherwise would NEVER be available if it weren't for patents and wealthy people who will pay for the research by buying them at a significant cost first.
Yes, it sucks that during those 14-40 years where patent shenanigans prevent the lower cost versions of a drug from being produced, and yes, people do die that might not have if the drugs came out cheap in the first place.
But if the drugs weren't researched, tested, and created in the first place, then not only will the current generation of poor suffer, but so will the next generation, and the next, and the next.
It is rare for a person or company to allow free distribution of their drug, but it does happen. Polio does not exist today in first world countries, and is largely absent elsewhere in the world due to Dr. Salk giving up the chance to patent it.
But many drugs that we benefit from now (antibiotics, pain medications, antihistamines, expectorants, cough suppressants, for instance) were patented, cost a lot at first, and now you can get a package of 30 of them without a prescription for a few dollars.
Aids drugs developed in the 90's are finally becoming freely available.
And yes, some gov't have forced the drug companies to give away their drugs. Notably certain AIDs drugs are licensed to other drug makers for distribution in africa, india, and elsewhere with token or no royalties or licensing fees, while people in the US still pay full price to cover not just the original research, but continued research.
Lastly, the point about treating the symptoms vs curing the disease is tiresome. Symptoms and their mechanisms are easier to understand, test, and develop for. Further, symptoms cover MANY variants of a given disease. We don't have a flu CURE because it mutates. Guess what? So does cancer, AIDs, and nearly every other disease vector.
The reality is that long after the original AIDs strain dies, the drugs developed to hit the SYMPTOMS of all the AIDs variants will still be working, and further they will apply to other diseases that aren't as prevalent.
Trust me. If a pharmaceutical company had a thin chance of CURING AIDs, they would be all over that, because they 1) would have something no one else has and 2) know that if they found it, someone else will too.
It's just not within our grasp right now.
There's also the fact that there's no one flu virus, but many...
But you're assuming that all those medicines would not get developed at all without "rich assholes".
And about the polio thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Foundation_for_Infantile_Paralysis#History
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